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EXPERIENCE PAYS OFF FOR TEXAS ATTORNEY

Thirteen years of experience with the Department of Justice appears to be paying off for Second Amendment advocates in the form of Texas attorney Bill Mateja, a principal in the Dallas office of Fish & Richardson, P.C.

He is the “boots on the ground” legal counsel in the case of Mance v. Holder, the case brought by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms that found the ban on interstate handgun sales to be unconstitutional. He’s also the CCRKBA April 2015 Defender of the Month.

Mateja was teamed with attorney Alan Gura, who won the Second Amendment Foundation’s celebrated case of McDonald v. City of Chicago, extending the Second Amendment to the states via the 14th Amendment.

William B. “Bill” Mateja has more than a quarter-century of legal experience. During his time with the Justice Department, , he was senior counsel to U.S. Deputy Attorneys General Larry Thompson and James Comey in Washington, D.C., and he also worked for the department in Texas. He was the justice Department’s special counsel for Health Care fraud and also worked on the President’s Corporate Fraud Task Force.

Now in private practice, Mateja works for clients with a variety of legal issues from the local to the federal level. “D” magazine named Mateja as one of the “Best Lawyers in Dallas” in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012, and he was also included in the 2011 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® in the practice area of Commercial Litigation, according to his biography.

One cannot gauge the value of this kind of experience until one sees it at work. The Mance case, according to CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, could have far-reaching implications.

“Our lawsuit strikes at the heart of a debate that has been ongoing for several years, since the creation of the National Instant Check System (NICS),” Gottlieb said. “With the advent of the NICS system, it makes no sense to perpetuate a ban on interstate transfers of handguns.”

CCRKBA’s case is financially supported by SAF, and is but one of the legal actions against gun laws that Gura has handled for the foundation.